From The Hill:

The Senate on Wednesday defeated each party’s version of a constitutional amendment that would have required a balanced federal budget.

The rival proposals would have prohibited Congress from spending more each year than it receives in revenue.

But each one fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to send them to the states for ratification.

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One of the chief responsibilities of the Congress is the provide oversight of the executive branch — a responsibility that the Democrat Congress has punted. The president nominated Donald Berwick to head the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, a proponent of rationing for the poor and elderly. Not only did the Congress not hold a single hearing about Berwick’s support for a government-run health care system, they never voted on his nomination. Berwick now heads an agency bigger than the Department of Defense without so much as a question being asked about his qualifications and extreme views.

Berkwick’s support for the imposition of a British-style health care system complete with its rationing regime is clear. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care–the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” Berwick said in a June 2009 interview with Biotechnology Healthcare.

In an interview last June, Dr. Berwick said, “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious, valuable, and — importantly — knowledge-building system.” He added that NICE has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.” Moments later, the interviewer asked, “So you are saying that the federal CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] agency should get involved in cost determinations?” Berwick replied, “You can say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t even look.’ But that would be irrational. The social budget is limited.” NICE is the government agency in Britain that rations care on a daily basis. Professor Mike Rawlins, the chairman the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) who said: “The question is not whether care is rationed but how.”

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Sen. Orrin Hatch is up for reelection in 2012. On Wednesday, he used his considerable powers to ensure that Lisa Murkowski–who, you know, lost a GOP primary and continues to wage a Quixotic battle that may prevent a GOP win in Alaska–didn’t lose any of her “privileges” in the Senate.

Hatch had this howler for the Wall Street Journal:

“We all respect the system, and she still is a Republican senator,’’ said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah.) after the closed party caucus. “It’s just a matter of good taste. We decided to keep the status quo as long as she’s a senator.’’

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Sometimes you hate being right.

In chapter 4 of our book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, we make the point that Team Obama would try to pull a fast one when it comes to Obamacare’s individual mandate that everyone reading this blog post needs to buy health insurance, or be subject to a penalty payable to your good friends at the IRS.

We first made this argument in a column we coauthored with Senator Orrin Hatch in the Wall Street Journal back in January. Now this issue has suddenly exploded back into the news.

For months, Team Obama has been saying that the individual mandate is authorized by Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce found in the Commerce Clause. We explain in the book why that argument is a loser in court, and that the White House would have to pull a bait-and-switch and suddenly argue that the mandate is a tax (violating Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K per year).

Looks like we were right. In their first filing against the multi-state lawsuit challenging Obamacare, Team Obama is now arguing that the individual mandate is… a tax.

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The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different outcomes.  The different versions of the jobs bills circulating in Washington DC these days are perfect example of that point.

See for instance, the  jobs tax credit for hiring new workers idea. What a brilliant example of bipartisan nonsense that is. Pushed by President Obama during his State of the Union address earlier this month and most recently picked up by Senators Schumer and Hatch.

Still no one seems to wonder, why would employers pay a new worker $40,000 to earn a $5,000 credit unless that worker generates at least $35,000 of revenue? Even when the advice comes from economists at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the largest association of small business owners in the country, it is ignored by the President and Congress.

This about it this way:

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The Senate is about to act on the nomination of militant leftist Dawn Johnsen to be the chief of the U.S. government’s elite legal team. But that post is a stepping-stone for top judicial offices, including the Supreme Court itself. That’s likely Barack Obama’s plans for Johnsen, and it’s why she must be stopped now.

Ultra-liberal activist Dawn Johnsen, currently a professor at Indiana University School of Law, is President Obama’s nominee to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). As the OLC chief, Johnsen would shape the legal positions of the Obama administration on every issue. OLC is the elite legal team for the federal government, giving legal advice on every important issue to the attorney general, other department heads in the government, and to the president himself. That’s why the head of OLC is called “the attorney general’s lawyer.”

The problem is that Johnsen is a radical. As the former legal director for the extremist abortion-rights group NARAL, Johnsen argued in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that denying a pregnant woman the right to demand unrestricted abortion is to subject her to slavery, which was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War.

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